A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [58]
Knights and squires of noble estate received fixed rates of pay like other men. For banneret (a lord who led other knights under his banner), bachelor knight, and mounted squire the standard rate in the 1340s was respectively 20, 10, and 6 to 7 sous a day. A persistent problem was the need to make sure that a ruler was getting the count and quality he paid for. To this end a montre or review was held periodically, generally every month, by officials with watchful eye to see that a valet was not counted as a gentilhomme, that sound horses were not substituted for nags during the review and then withdrawn, and that pay was honestly distributed in coin and not in kind. In a loosely structured army, hierarchy of command was lacking. Apart from the King, who led in person, the permanent officials were the Constable, a kind of administrative chief of armed forces, and two Marshals of indeterminate function; otherwise, military decisions seem to have been reached by group council among the leaders.
Because of the necessity of donning armor with all its straps and buckles, battle was a more or less fixed engagement, arranged by the logic of approaching positions. The invention of plate armor early in the 14th century now supplemented chain mail, which was penetrable by the crossbow. While styles of armor varied and changed from one decade to the next, the basics were a suit of plate armor consisting of a chest piece, a skirt of linked hoops, and arm and leg pieces, all worn over a hauberk or shirt of chain mail and a leather or padded tunic, or a tight-fitting surcoat. Over the plate was worn a sleeveless jerkin embroidered with the coat-of-arms identifying the wearer. Chain mail covered the neck, elbows, and other joints; gauntlets of linked plates protected the hands. The helmet, formerly open over the face, now had the added protection of a visor hinged by removable pins at the brow or on the side. Weighing seven to eleven pounds, it was dark and stuffy inside, despite eye slits and ventilation holes. The weight of all the added protection was somewhat compensated by a smaller shield that allowed greater freedom of action.
“A terrible worm in an iron cocoon,” as he was called in an anonymous poem, the knight rode on a saddle rising in a high ridge above the horse’s backbone with his feet resting in very long stirrups so that he was virtually standing up and able to deliver tremendous swinging blows from side to side with any one of his armory of weapons. He began battle with the lance used for unhorsing the enemy, while from his belt hung a two-handed sword at one side and an eighteen-inch dagger on the other. He also had available, either attached to his saddle or carried by his squire, a longer sword for thrusting like a lance, a battle-ax fitted with a spike behind the curved blade, and a club-headed mace with sharpened, ridged edges, a weapon favored by martial bishops and abbots on the theory that it did not come under the rule forbidding clerics “to smite with the edge of the sword.” The war-horse carrying this burden was itself armored by plates protecting nose, chest, and rump and caparisoned with draperies that got in the way of its legs. When his horse was felled, the knight, weighed down by his armor and tangled in weapons, shield, and spurs, was likely to be captured before he could manage to rise.
Tactics on the continent were simply the cavalry charge of knights followed by hand-to-hand fighting on foot, sometimes preceded or supplemented by archers and infantry, both of which the knights despised. In the Scottish wars, however, the English had found that foot soldiers equipped with the longbow and trained to keep a disciplined line could, by aiming